Snarling Dogs Blue Doo - Guts  [schematic]

All about modern commercial stompbox circuits from Electro Harmonix over MXR, Boss and Ibanez into the nineties.
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Bside2234
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Post by Bside2234 »

Picked this up for really cheap. Pretty decent sounding. It's very loud. Loud as in a lot of volume, not noisy or hissy. Build quality kinda sucks a little. IC's are sanded off. I'll crack it open again if anyone wants more pictures or has a question. The Snarl/Bite adds some treble/brightness/crunch.
https://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i44/ ... G_0877.jpg
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analogguru
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Post by analogguru »

The Black Dog and Tweed E Dog are a poor clone of an EH Hottubes.
People who tried to clone it, did not understand how the circuit is working and/or made a routing mistake IMHO.

Remove C10 in your unit and place it instead between pin 5 of IC2 and GND.

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Post by Bside2234 »

Thanks AG. I'll give it a try. Any idea what the IC's could be? Same as the EH pedal? I'll give a search for the EH pedal a go and compare.
Thanks again.

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Post by TNO »

If this mod applies to the tweed e dog I'd like to try it. Excuse my ignorance, but how do I determine which is pin 5 on the ic? My tweed-e sounds good but is unusable because it picks up a crazy amount of rf.

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Post by Bside2234 »

The pin with the circle by it is pin 1 and 2,3,and 4 are below it. On the other side starting at the top again is 5,6,7 and 8.

Can you post some pics of your T.E. Dog so I can see the differences?

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Post by RLBJR65 »

Thanks for the guts!
Circle is at pin one and then go round counter clockwise.
1 -- 8
2 -- 7
3 -- 6
4 -- 5
Hottube schem. http://www.muzique.com/schem/hottube.gif

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Post by bucksears »

Ok, not sure what happened to the recent updates to this thread before the outage, but I have some info since receiving my three-knob (blue case, white lettering) Blue Doo recently.
It's not a BAD sounding pedal, but it's not great either. It's quite bassy and a bit 'flubby' until you turn up the tone and gain. It has a decent distortion (which picks up pretty quickly at the end of the knob rotation), almost a cross between a British & American sound when cranked up (more on that later). At lower gain, it's too dark for any articulation or finesse playing.

1) It is VERY noisy in terms of picking up radio signals.
2) Apparently (as suspected) all three overdrives (Black Dog, Tweed Dog, Blue Doo) use the same circuit board, just slightly different parts here/there.
3) It uses the same ICs and input cap (.1uF) as the Black Dog
4) The 10uF electrolytic cap (in parallel to the 75k resistor on the LM1458) is 6.8uF on the Blue Doo

There are a couple of other cap values that I'd like to confirm, including the distortion pot, but overall, it looks like the same values (the ones marked with the asterisk) are changed depending on the model of the pedal. What's interesting is that the Blue Doo looks like a mix of values of Tweed AND the Black Dog. I'm not crazy about the sound and mainly got it to try it out and confirm parts values.
I might have a Black Dog on the way too, but we'll see.

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Post by Bside2234 »

Not sure what happened to some of the posts here but here is the revised schematic I had on here before. Everything highlighted in yellow is not in my chrome 2 knob Blue Doo.
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Blue-Doo-compare.jpg

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Post by Bside2234 »

bucksears wrote:Ok, not sure what happened to the recent updates to this thread before the outage, but I have some info since receiving my three-knob (blue case, white lettering) Blue Doo recently.
It's not a BAD sounding pedal, but it's not great either. It's quite bassy and a bit 'flubby' until you turn up the tone and gain. It has a decent distortion (which picks up pretty quickly at the end of the knob rotation), almost a cross between a British & American sound when cranked up (more on that later). At lower gain, it's too dark for any articulation or finesse playing.

1) It is VERY noisy in terms of picking up radio signals.
2) Apparently (as suspected) all three overdrives (Black Dog, Tweed Dog, Blue Doo) use the same circuit board, just slightly different parts here/there.
3) It uses the same ICs and input cap (.1uF) as the Black Dog
4) The 10uF electrolytic cap (in parallel to the 75k resistor on the LM1458) is 6.8uF on the Blue Doo

There are a couple of other cap values that I'd like to confirm, including the distortion pot, but overall, it looks like the same values (the ones marked with the asterisk) are changed depending on the model of the pedal. What's interesting is that the Blue Doo looks like a mix of values of Tweed AND the Black Dog. I'm not crazy about the sound and mainly got it to try it out and confirm parts values.
I might have a Black Dog on the way too, but we'll see.
Mine doesn't pick up any radio at all. I never got around to adding the tone section to mine. Mine's not bassy or flubby at all. I wonder if it's the fault of the tone section. If it was though, I would guess that turning the tone bypass switch would fix it.

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Post by fosnal1950 »

For radio signals try a 27 to 68 K resistor in the input to the opamp. It might do the trick.

Alf

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Post by bucksears »

Thanks for the tip, but I'm not that thrilled with it to try and fix it. It'll go on the shelf until I feel like parting with it.
In other news: I now have a Black Dog on the way - only paid $25 for it, so it's not a big loss if I don't like that one either. I'm really curious as to how this one sounds.

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Post by adajam4 »

Sorry to hijack a really old thread - hoping for some help as I have NO idea about electronics, but one of the engineers at work specialises in electronics and does soldering all of the time. I got this pedal when I was 16ish and started playing guitar and when I moved my mum, somehow, managed to "Remove" it from the house. For my 30th, she bought me an immaculate (on the outside) one from eBay. The unit has A LOT of hiss and generally and when plugged in solely to my PSB1U - getting pure whine from the amp... 9V battery, it is playable.

Sorry to ask someone to dumb this down to the easiest common denominator, but I really want this pedal on my board (probably more for nostalgia, but hey). Does anyone have advice I can pass to the engineer to reduce the hiss (which I imagine is RF) and to resolve the DC issue.

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Post by mirosol »

Boss power supplies tend to do that to many pedals. As do most other switched-mode power supplies. I'd suggest trying out a few different power supplies before doing anything to the pedal itself. Your symptoms are most likely due to that one power supply and it's ripple effect.

More power filter on the pedal end could help it a bit, but still. I'm fairly certain that this is only a power supply issue.

On a side note, a friend of mine was planning to sell his Belle Epoch as defect unit due to similar whine. I told him to ditch the boss supply for cheapest harley benton power plant and the whine was gone. Not saying those are particularly good power supplies either. But one has worked for me for quite some time now.
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Post by fdrojo »

Hi

Someone has a wiring diagramn of Snarling dogs fuzz effect (or just a photo)?
I have a problem with my fuzz.
Thank you

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Post by ilcaccillo »

analogguru wrote: 24 Feb 2009, 02:03 The Black Dog and Tweed E Dog are a poor clone of an EH Hottubes.
People who tried to clone it, did not understand how the circuit is working and/or made a routing mistake IMHO.
The person that developed the Black Dog and Tweed E Dog is the same person that developed the EH Hot Tubes initially,
read this for more info:

https://captain6string.blogspot.com/201 ... edals.html

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Post by Nocentelli »

I think it is quite possible that Captain6string designed the circuit "correctly" but snarling dogs messed up in the production.

Interesting read, but I'm not sure about this bit:
"Guitarist Jimmy Page used a Micro Synthesizer on Led Zeppelin’s recording of “No Quarter”" I am fairly certain this is not correct, since the microsynth came out in '1977 and No Quarter was released four years earlier in 1973.
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Post by Ben N »

Mike Matthews needed this guy to design -- an A/B switch? Furealz?
But at least he admits that Anderton was first.

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Post by theehman »

Ben N wrote: 30 Sep 2020, 11:56 Mike Matthews needed this guy to design -- an A/B switch? Furealz?
But at least he admits that Anderton was first.
I don't think he "needed" him to design one. I think he just thought it was a good idea and made his own.
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Post by Ben N »

I was commenting on the claim, which is, to my mind, silly.

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